Antigone re-imagined: uprooted women’s political narratives

In this paper I am thinking with Antigone, a political figuration that has been invested with many readings, interpretations, and artistic expressions in feminist theory and beyond. The paper draws on a research project of listening to migrant and refugee women’s narratives of displacement and travelling. What connects these stories via the figure of Antigone, is women’s desire to tell their stories as an expression of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. What I argue is that uprooted women’s narratives follow the Arendtian tripartite schema of political action by intervening in the ethics and politics of forced choices, becoming spectators of impossible actions and inscribing mnemonic traces in emerging decolonial histories and feminist genealogies.

As accepted for publication in Feminist Theory: Tamboukou M. Antigone re-imagined: uprooted women’s political narratives. Feminist Theory. April 2021. doi:10.1177/14647001211005298